It
is generally conceded today by most Jeffersonian scholars that Thomas
Jefferson had a lengthy affair with slave Sally Hemings and that that
liaison resulted in numerous children. It is also generally conceded
that Annette Gordon-Reed is the world’s foremost authority on the
nature, or at least, probable nature of that liaison. That is a queer
state of affairs, for there is scant historical evidence that
implicates Jefferson—which mostly reduces to a published 1873
testimony
that is not without flaws by Madison Hemings in which he confesses,
among other things, to be the son of Thomas Jefferson—and all we
know biologically is that Sally’s son Eston has the Jefferson
Y-chromosome. That makes Jefferson a candidate
for paternity—perhaps the most likely candidate—but being the
most likely candidate does not necessarily make it probable that
Jefferson is Madison’s or Eston’s father, or the father of any of
Sally Hemings’s other children, which is generally assumed. (In
one roll of a pair of fair dice, seven is the most probable of all
possible numerical outcomes yet seven is not probable—viz.,
there is merely a 0.167 chance of it occurring.)
So how is it that Gordon-Reed has so much to say on the nature of the
liaison between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, if there is no cogent
evidence for that liaison?

The
story begins with Gordon-Reed’s Thomas
Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An Intimate Affair
(1997). That book was motivated much by granddaughter Ellen Wayles
Randolph’s statement apropos of Thomas Jefferson’s involvement
with Hemings in a letter to Joseph Coolidge. Randolph writes: “I
ask is it likely that so fond, so anxious a father … [would] have
selected the female attendant of his own pure children to become his
paramour! The thing will not bear telling. There are things, after
all, as moral impossibilities.” Gordon-Reed’s book is a reply to
Randolph’s statements to the effect that her grandfather’s moral
intemerateness cannot be called into question. It can, avers
Gordon-Reed. Why?

Gordon-Reed
explains in an infamous none-of-this-follows passage:

For
some scholars Jefferson’s fastidiousness, his attachment to reason
and rationality, his zeal for exactitude, his obsession with
orderliness, all signal that he was without a real capacity for
romantic involvement or sexual passion. What one makes of the fact
that an individual possesses some or all of these characteristics is
a function of one’s own values and experiences and, of course,
one’s personal view of what it takes to be sexual or romantic.
People who are compulsive about making lists have no interests in sex
or romance. People who hold their emotions severely in check have no
interest in sex or romance. People who are extremely clean have no
interest in sex or romance. None of this follows. It is not even
remotely a fact that a person who possesses all of these traits—even
in abundance—is without sexual passion or romantic yearnings.

Whatever
we might claim to know about Jefferson’s fastidiousness,
rationality, exactitude, and orderliness, she asserts, none of them
has any bearing on the issue of Jefferson’s possible involvement
with Hemings. Only one’s values, experiences, and personal view of
sexuality are relevant; psychical dispositions, it seems, are not.
That Jefferson was an obsessively fastidious person, that Jefferson
was an obsessively rational person, that Jefferson was an obsessively
exacting person, and that Jefferson was an obsessively orderly
person—all such things are readily evident to anyone who studies
the man in his full dimensionality—have no
bearing on the
likelihood of a relationship with Hemings, or for that matter, with
anyone else.

Gordon-Reed’s
is a strange argument. If she is attacking the Freudian front, which
today is easily assailable, she gets wrong Freud and neo-Freudians.
They do not argue that inordinately fastidious, rational, exacting,
and orderly persons are “without sexual passion or romantic
yearnings,” but only that their sexual passion is sublimated—viz.,
channeled into fastidiousness, rationality, exactitude, and
orderliness. Yet Gordon-Reed’s argument attempts more. It essays to
be a coup de grâce,
which leaves no room for any appeal to psychological states or
dispositions in an effort to vindicate Jefferson of involvement with
Hemings. Character is too complex for simple psychological
assessment, thus, no psychology-based argument from character will
vindicate Jefferson. That leaves wide open the possibility of a
liaison.

Gordon-Reed’s
argument, if assumed cogent, has remarkable consequences for the
discipline of “behavioral” psychology. The putative correlations
that such psychologists purport to have established between
psychological dispositions are contrived, hokey. Thus, anything, it
seems, goes—even the possibility of a liaison between Jefferson and
Hemings.

Of
course, possibility
does not allow for much. If taken logically, to state that a claim is
possible is equivalent to the claim that that claim is not
impossible, and that states little. It is not impossible that
Jefferson had a sexual relationship with nephew Peter Carr—at
least, there is no evidence that rules that out. It is not impossible
that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with daughter Martha or
daughter Maria. Fawn Brodie, after all, said that some of the letters
between Jefferson and his daughter Maria (e.g., TJ to Maria Jefferson
Eppes, 11 Jan. 1803) were at least covertly sexual. Yet, I suspect,
no one would take sex with Carr or with Maria seriously. Why, then,
should we take sex with Hemings seriously?

Yet
Gordon-Reed in her 1997 book appears to be saying something more
bewildering than merely that there can be no science of behavioral
psychology, because of the tenuous linkage of psychological
dispositions. Sexual behavior, she appears to be claiming, is itself
not a psychical disposition and it is not linked with psychical
dispositions. Consider her statement, “What
one makes of the fact that an individual possesses some or all of
these characteristics is a function of one’s own values and
experiences and, of course, one’s personal view of what it takes to
be sexual or romantic.” With some allowance for quibbling, she
appears to be saying that values, experiences, and personal views are
not psychological
dispositions, and thus, they are not the province of psychologists.
That she corrects the behavioral psychologists and that she takes it
upon herself to show in later works not merely that a liaison between
Jefferson and Hemings is probable, but that it did happen, argue
strongly that she believes it is the province of historians, not
psychologists, to disclose a figure’s values, experiences, and
personal views.

Fast
forward to the 1998 DNA study, which found a chromosomal match
between Sally’s son Eston and Jefferson. The scientists behind the
study argued that the best explanation—the “simplest”—was
that Jefferson was the father of Eston and the likely father of
Sally’s other children. Having disclosed the chromosomal match
between Jefferson and Eston Hemings, why did they take themselves fit
authorities to adjudge Thomas Jefferson’s paternity, when they must
have been aware that there were many others with the Jefferson
Y-chromosome? That is a difficult question to answer.

Further
“confirmatory” evidence came with the Thomas Jefferson Memorial
Foundation’s (TJMF) 2000 study of the evidence concerning
Jefferson’s possible paternity. Reviewing the evidence, committee
members agreed with the scientists behind the DNA study, though it is
unclear just how they arrived at a scholarly “consensus,” given
the scarcity and ambiguity of evidence at their disposal. Evidence of
some duplicity exists in the 2001 “Report
of the Scholar’s Commission,” in which scholars, reviewing
the evidence, came to a consensus contradictory to the TJMF's finding —Jefferson was very
likely not the father of Eston Hemings or any of the Hemings’s
children.

With
the patronage of the DNA study and squarely behind the TJMF’s
verdict, which incriminated Jefferson apropos of paternity of Sally
Hemings’s children, Gordon-Reed in places in The
Hemingses of Monticello (2008)
and in subsequent talks and interviews treats Jefferson’s
involvement with Hemings as a fait
accompli. She goes on
with gasconade to describe in detail the particulars of that
liaison—a lengthy, loving, mutually fulfilling, and on-the-quiet
affair between, not master and slave, but equals. Many questions are
skirted, as if irrelevant. Why would Jefferson fall hopeless in love
with someone who was likely illiterate and not much more than a mere
child when the two presumably got involved in France? Why would he,
with such profuse love for Hemings, urge his daughters and their
husbands to live with them at Monticello? Why would he, were he
carrying on a decades-long relationship with Hemings, allow for
numerous visitors on a weekly basis at Monticello? Would not he wish
for privacy? Moreover, how could he conceal so perfectly such an
affair for over three decades? Furthermore, why did Madison Hemings
wait till 1783 to announce to the world that he was the son of Thomas
Jefferson? Again, why were Madison’s siblings throughout their life
quiet concerning the liaison?

Let
us now scroll backward to Thomas
Jefferson and Sally Hemings.
Must we conclude, in agreement with Gordon-Reed, that “none of this
follows”—i.e., that psychologists, who forge generalizations
concerning human behavior based on decades of observations and apply
them to new cases, are nonadept judges of a person’s character, and
that only historians, presumably adept at ferreting out the
particulars of a person’s life, are uniquely qualified to judge a
figure’s personality?

Not
in the least. It simply does not follow that “none of this
follows.” There are
correlations between psychological dispositions and such correlations
are reliable, though not inviolable, predictors of a person’s
behavior. Those correlations, however, are matters for those who
study human behavior, not for historians, to determine, even though
historians, through the unique sort of digging that they do, can
contribute considerably to our apprehension of the behavioral
tendencies of key historical figures.

Thus,
if “none of this follows” itself does not follow, we then cannot
with a few glib, seductive phrases, merely vilipend the work of
behavioral psychologists in order to advance a thesis.

We
thus return to where we began: the pesky argument from character,
which must be addressed, not dismissed, by historians.